Election may see Moldova turn west

MOSCOW - Moldova, Europe's poorest country, went to the polls yesterday in an election that is likely to see yet another former Soviet republic turn its back on the Kremlin in favour of European integration.

Although Moldova has little realistic chance of joining the EU any time soon due to its dire economy, that is the direction many of the country's political parties want it to go in.

Bizarrely, a party led by Vladimir Voronin, Europe's last Communist head of state, is expected to comfortably win the ballot though opposition forces claim a velvet-style revolution may yet occur.

Appearances can be deceptive: Mr Voronin has latterly become Communist in name only and has started looking West not East, a fact that has frustrated the would-be revolutionaries who accuse him of stealing their political clothes.

His main challenge comes from the centrist Democratic Moldova Bloc, which seeks good ties with both Moscow and the West, and the right-of-centre, pro-Romanian Christian Democrats.

Yesterday's vote is crucial. It will decide the makeup of a new 101-seat parliament that will in turn vote to elect a new president - Mr Voronin has been in power since 2001.

Once staunchly pro-Russian, he performed a U-turn in 2003 and effectively stuck two fingers up at Moscow over its support for the Russian-speaking breakaway region of Trans-dniester, the source of a civil war in the early 1990s.

Mr Voronin wants the 1,200 Russian "peacekeepers" who are stationed there to withdraw and for the crime-infested, traditionally economically robust enclave to return to Moldova proper.

However, Moscow has shown itself reluctant to act on the issue, a fact that has seen bilateral relations enter the deep freeze. In the run-up to yesterday's election relations worsened still further.

Mr Voronin expelled 20 Russians from the country he accused of being spies and blocked the entry of 100 Russian election observers he alleged were bent on disrupting the ballot.

He has also claimed that shadowy Russian forces are planning to assassinate him and had already alarmed Russia by abandoning an earlier pledge to make Russian the country's official second language (rump Moldova is Romanian-speaking) and by aligning himself with Brussels.

Russia struck back by threatening sanctions, notably by hiking the price of the oil and gas it supplies to Moldova, while the Russian media has broadcast allegations that Mr Voronin took a backhander from a crime boss.

Mr Voronin's 'political epiphany' has posed a problem for his opponents. Heartened by the success of velvet revolutions in the former Soviet states of Georgia and Ukraine, opposition politicians are hoping that Moldova will have its own revolution on the back of yesterday's election, an election they contend was flawed.

They have even booked the central square in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, for Ukraine-style demonstrations for the next two weeks. They argue that the ruling Communist government used the police to intimidate them, choked off their access to the media and that Mr Voronin is little more than a sleaze-soaked opportunist.

But pre-election opinion polls showed that the public doesn't agree. They showed the Communists enjoyed the support of 62 per cent of the populace - the opposition claims the figures were rigged.

Pro-Russian parties are not forecast to get anywhere near 62 per cent of the vote.

Moldova, which is sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, is crushingly poor. Infamously some of its citizens are forced to sell their organs or babies to survive and a quarter of its four million strong population works abroad.

- INDEPENDENT